[CTC] ‘A Lot of Life Years Lost’: How NAFTA Shortened American Life Spans

[Arthur Stamoulis]

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/13/us/politics/a-lot-of-life-years-lost-how-nafta-shortened-american-life-spans.html

‘A Lot of Life Years Lost’: How NAFTA Shortened American Life Spans

By Ana Swanson | March 13, 2026

The North American Free Trade Agreement, the deal that began
integrating the Mexican economy with the United States and Canada in
the 1990s, has been a politically charged topic for decades.

Centrist Democrats and Republicans supported the agreement as a way to
strengthen the North American economy. But its legacy has been mixed.
In some parts of the United States, the agreement shuttered factories
and put people out of work as companies moved production to Mexico,
where labor was cheaper. President Trump won over unions and other
workers as a candidate by labeling NAFTA the “worst agreement ever”
and promising to improve or scrap it.

A new paper adds to the understanding of NAFTA’s costs. In it,
economists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the
University of Chicago found that American workers in communities that
were more exposed to competition from Mexican imports saw a
significant shortening of their life spans after the trade deal went
into effect in 1994.

The new study concludes, for example, that in the first 15 years of
NAFTA, about 3 percent of 45-year-old men lost a year of their
remaining life expectancy as a result of the trade deal. The
researchers saw increases in mortality across most major causes of
death, including illness, drug overdoses and suicides. The overall
trends particularly affected working-age men, and were more pronounced
in the Southeast and parts of the Midwest, like Michigan.

Matthew Notowidigdo, one of the report’s authors, said in an interview
that the work highlighted an “underappreciated cost of globalization.”
In the cities and towns facing new competition from Mexican factories,
“life expectancy falls, and it hits really hard on men,” he said.

“We’re talking about a lot of life years lost,” he added.

The changes, he said, were large enough to outweigh prior estimates
about NAFTA’s nationwide benefits, including cheaper goods for
consumers.

The findings come as the Trump administration gears up for yet another
fight over NAFTA. Mr. Trump did not scrap the deal during his first
term but instead renegotiated it and renamed it the United
States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

But Mr. Trump now says the U.S.M.C.A. is not working, and the three
countries are scheduled to have a “joint review” of the agreement this
summer. The Trump administration has said it will renew the agreement
only if certain issues are resolved, including the trade deficits the
United States runs with Mexico and Canada and other trading behaviors
the administration deems unfair.

Mr. Notowidigdo agreed that Mr. Trump and his advisers had picked up
on the harms that NAFTA had caused many workers around the United
States. “To give Donald Trump and some of his administration some
credit, I think economists have probably had an overly rosy view of
NAFTA,” he said.

But Mr. Notowidigdo said he did not want his paper to be interpreted
as a call to “go back to the world before NAFTA, hoping that in that
world, these manufacturing jobs come back.”

“It’s very hard to imagine that taking place,” he said.

Mr. Notowidigdo also cautioned that NAFTA might have had other
benefits that his paper didn’t capture, including in innovation or in
helping North America as a whole remain competitive against other
parts of the world.

U.S. factory work probably would have declined even without NAFTA,
just not as rapidly, Mr. Notowidigdo said. China’s entry into the
World Trade Organization in 2001 was a significant source of
competition. And trends in automation, technology and offshoring have
meant that most rich nations — and even some poorer ones — are seeing
rates of manufacturing employment decline.

“What NAFTA did is it accelerated it,” Mr. Notowidigdo said. He
pointed to other countries, like Denmark, that had set up systems to
help support and retrain workers who had lost their jobs.

Several of the report’s authors previously studied the effects on
American life spans of the Great Recession beginning in 2008. In a
surprising finding, they concluded that the recession had extended
Americans’ life spans — in part because people ended up driving less,
and therefore had fewer fatal accidents, and because less driving and
economic activity translated into less air pollution.

But they found that NAFTA had the opposite effect, as did the
so-called China shock, when many American factories moved to China
after the country joined the W.T.O. .

The economists sought to demonstrate causation, not just correlation,
between NAFTA and the increase in mortality. First, to determine the
group with high exposure to NAFTA, they identified parts of the
country that had the most employment in industries where import
tariffs were lowered. Then they compared those places with those not
exposed to NAFTA to see how the trade deal changed communities.

Gordon Hanson, a Harvard economist who has studied NAFTA but was not
affiliated with the study, praised the paper and its methodology. He
said it highlighted how manufacturing-led economic declines were
different from broad recessions, in that they hit a subset of
communities highly specialized in manufacturing, leading to issues
like more stress and substance abuse.

NAFTA created a single market for about a third of the world’s
economic production, and led to the gradual removal of tariffs on the
continent over the next 15 years.

The United States and Canada already had a free-trade agreement, so
the main impact of NAFTA was the integration of Mexico, where wages
were much lower. While the agreement was strongly motivated by foreign
policy reasons, economists thought it would also benefit the U.S.
economy, at least somewhat.

Many economic analyses eventually found that the welfare gains for the
United States from NAFTA were fairly small. That’s because trade
accounts for a smaller percentage of the U.S. economy than it does for
many other nations.

But in certain parts of the United States where factories moved
overseas, the negative effects of NAFTA were concentrated. Because
manufacturing jobs were more unionized and tended to be highly paid,
especially for men with less education, workers who lost their factory
jobs tended to end up in much worse situations.

Previous academic research found that factory closures led to earlier
deaths among local workers, whether from disease, drug overdose or
other causes. The economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton have shown
that the decline of manufacturing was connected with higher rates of
opioid addiction and “deaths of despair” from alcohol, drugs and
suicide.

Other research has shown that areas more exposed to NAFTA saw declines
in wages and employment, and a shift in political support away from
the Democratic Party toward Republicans and Mr. Trump.